


The Space Between

by starfleetdicks



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Extended Scene, Falling In Love, Friendship/Love, M/M, Missing Scene, One-Sided Relationship, References to Wrath of Khan, Star Trek: Into Darkness, Star Trek: Into Darkness Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-21
Updated: 2013-05-21
Packaged: 2017-12-12 12:40:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/811694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starfleetdicks/pseuds/starfleetdicks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kirk’s skin is cool to the touch, his hair softer than Spock imagined, and the stiffness he expects to feel at the base of Kirk’s neck at this unexpected contact is strangely absent. Kirk shifts, lets out a noisy breath, and leans into the touch. Spock’s fingers tingle. He finds there is some comfort in touching Kirk like this. Fascinating. </p><p>He moves closer, drawn to Kirk until there is almost no space between. </p><p> </p><p>Into Darkness scene fill/extension, after Kirk's speech at the anniversary ceremony to the end of the movie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Space Between

Spock finds Kirk where he expects: in the newly rebuilt conference room where they had convened a year ago. Kirk stands at the window, looking out. A chair is askew at the table but Spock ignores the meaning of it, focusing on the tense line of his captain’s shoulders. He places his cap silently on the table, folds his hands behind his back, and waits to be noticed and addressed. He will give Kirk what time he needs.

“I keep waiting for him to walk in and ask me what the hell I think I’m doing. Or congratulate me for the five year mission. Smack me hard on the back and grin at me.” Kirk turns, inhaling through his nose and sighing. 

The sound is louder than normal, more aggravated. Spock doesn’t move, just observing Kirk. 

Kirk rubs his eyes. “Sometimes it still doesn’t feel real.”

Spock refrains from answering that, sure that all thirty-four responses that leap to mind would lead Kirk to emotional outbursts.

“I should have stayed on him. I knew he was injured but my brain was thirty steps ahead of me, trying to be the goddamn hero.”

“Captain, your actions prevented more people from dying. It was only logical.”

“Logic doesn’t help me sleep at night or erase his face from my memory.” Kirk snorts, nodding and walking toward Spock, touching the stray chair. 

Spock looks down at the seat, imagines the playful but stern dialogue Pike indulged in as Kirk poked around on his debriefing screen and became outspoken. He also recalls his mother as she stood on their porch, overlooking the jagged mountains of Vulcan, teaching him Standard. Her touch as she cleaned the blood from his lips without comment. Her smile when she told him she would always be proud of him. And finally, fear and sadness etched into every precious human wrinkle that decorated her face as the ground crumbled from beneath her and took her from him. Spock closes his eyes before looking to Kirk again.

It is easy to recall Admiral Pike as well, his emotions through the meld, some shadow of memories, and the abrupt darkness of his mind as he expired. Easier still to remember how Kirk reacted, as most humans do when faced with death; the scent of tears and the sight of him, broken and anguished. 

“I find myself able to understand your meaning too well, Captain.” Spock replies, a shock of sympathy running through him, incontrovertibly human and raw. For a moment, he aches to reach out and comfort Kirk through a physical touch. He checks the feeling, clenching his hands at his sides to steady them. 

Kirk glances at him, understanding lightening the blue of his eyes and drowning Spock’s focus. 

His memories are hurled backward, to the pale and dying captain beyond the glass. As the face of Admiral Pike haunts him, Kirk’s face haunts Spock. In his nightmares, they are not so lucky. When he returns with Khan’s prone form, fateful blood still pumping, they are already too late. Kirk beyond saving, despite hope so close. The emotions find him in his dreams, forcing him to wakefulness with his captain’s name a shout on his lips. And the image of that strong body and bright spirit covered delicately in a modest, white sheet whispers to life a fear and a guilt Spock cannot repress. 

Spock understands Kirk’s emotions too well.

“Spock,” Kirk calls. Spock straightens, tugging his already impeccable uniform into place. Kirk stares, scrutinizing Spock’s face as if all the answers lie there, bared for the world to see. “It’s okay.” Kirk’s palm is warm on Spock’s bicep, the squeeze of his fingers firm but reassuring. “I’m sorry,” his captain adds and Spock wonders when he had the time to move so close. He is intruding on Spock’s immediate personal space, a mere eleven point twenty three hundredths inches away. 

“You are sorry?” Spock remains rooted in place, as still as possible under that touch. Does he want to invite further intimate contact? It would not be wise. There are regulations and protocols expected of their ranks. Regardless, he thinks, he does not know what Kirk intends by his touch. Logically, it must only be sympathy and Spock is ashamed by what he feels. 

Kirk nods slowly, glancing away for only a moment. “You’ve had it much worse. You’ve lost your mother, your planet, and Pike. I’m standing here sulking like I’m the only one who knows how painful this is, like I’m all alone.”

“You are not alone. I am here.”

“Yeah. I mean no, I mean alone emotionally.” Kirk huffs, smiles, and Spock is astonished by the contrast of Kirk’s emotion and his physical expression.

Spock looks away immediately, afraid to face that smile for too long and divine its falsehoods. 

“I only lost a mentor. A man I looked up to for a few years. It could have been much worse...”

“Captain,” Spock interrupts firmly and the hand on his bicep jerks away at the formality. He closes his eyes against the weird twisting in his chest at that loss and the chill he knows logically he cannot feel through his uniform. “Please, do not continue. My bereavements do not negate your own. The admiral was a remarkable, preternatural man and was a father figure to you. I have lost a parent, yes, but you have endured the death of two fathers.” 

Kirk sits heavily in the chair, covering his face, and Spock waits. It is five minutes and forty-eight seconds before Kirk looks to him again and Spock does not mention the unshed tears he sees Kirk fighting. 

“I have the shittiest luck.” Kirk smiles and turns away to breathe in deeply, sniffling and clearing his throat. 

To Spock, it sounds instead like a plea. 

_Spock, I’m scared._

Kirk’s skin is cool to the touch, his hair softer than Spock imagined, and the stiffness he expects to feel at the base of Kirk’s neck at this unexpected contact is strangely absent. Kirk shifts, lets out a noisy breath, and leans into the touch. Spock’s fingers tingle. He finds there is some comfort in touching Kirk like this. Fascinating. 

He moves closer, drawn to Kirk until there is almost no space between. 

Spock yearns for experiments and science to explain in numbers and data what he cannot understand. His father once explained that Vulcans feel more deeply than humans. He has always felt something: pleasure and deep affection with Uhura, heartache for his mother, despair for his people. They are shades of feelings, repressed and controlled by logic. It is illogical to grieve death and call it untimely and wish to change the events that led to its culmination. Illogical to worry for the future of his people as it is aptly being handle by his older counterpart and the federation; the threat of Nero long gone. And Uhura explained that it was only natural that she seek someone out who felt as strongly, emotionally, for her as Spock seemed to feel about Kirk. 

However, he does not understand what qualifies Kirk as different, causes him to dig deep under all of his barriers and settle himself into Spock’s mind. He uproots all logical thinking and constraints. Spock wishes he could pinpoint the moment. Where were the turning points in their relationship when hate gave way to begrudging respect to forced familiarity to sudden, inexorable friendship?

The muscles beneath Spock’s highly-sensitized fingers roll and stretch as Kirk moves. His captain seems as far away as himself, from the set line of Kirk’s jaw and the distant look in his eyes. Spock trembles with the knowledge that he reads Kirk too well, from intimate and learned body cues. 

They were friends long before Spock said it aloud, before they were breath away, touching if not for the glass between them. 

He had answered with too much feeling in the moment, too much grief. But he knew that truth with the same certainty that said the Terran sun rose in the East and that Vulcans do not lie. There had been no shame in his display of emotion. There is no shame in his comforting of Kirk now. How could he be shameful when Kirk looked so pleased and relieved that finally he understood? Or when Kirk leans into his touch and relaxes?

And there had been so much more, unspoken, as their hands found each other on either side of that door. It hit Spock too swiftly as that hand slipped away slowly and those eyes left his. It was wrong. That was not Kirk’s destiny, not his path to walk. He was not meant to leave Spock like this, unbearably close but unable to reach out and save him. 

Rage had furiously swirled in him, fueled by the thought of Admiral Pike, their ship, his lost mother, and Vulcan. Where Nero had escaped his wrath, Khan did not. 

It’s the heating of Kirk’s skin beneath his, without science and correlation, that suddenly reveals to him what makes Kirk different. 

He should have known; like his mother, Kirk awakens the human side of him so spectacularly. It can only be one thing. He doesn’t give name to it, doesn’t burden himself with the weight of what it will mean, what he cannot expect from Kirk. 

When finally Kirk stands, Spock lets his hand fall away, brushing creases from the back of Kirk’s uniform. There is a mumbled thank you somewhere beneath those heavy sighs and false smiles. They walk silently through the building and out into the still scarred landscape of San Francisco, fixing their hats into place. Kirk pauses to soak in the sun, inhaling sharply, and groaning. 

The shuttle ride is peaceful, a few ensigns and lieutenants strapped in and chatting about the five-year mission, their hopes, their dreams, what they plan to find among those distant stars. And though he sits next to Kirk instead of placing a seat between them, they do not talk or touch, carefully professional. Grief and comfort are for private moments, Spock has observed in human interaction. 

Kirk cannot be weak here, where a veritable army of people look up to his command.

On the Enterprise, Spocks leaves Kirk only to change out of his uniform and into his standard issue science blues. He is on the bridge before long, readying the ship for launch, helping commanders secure their stations. 

“Keptin on ze bridge!” Chekov informs the crew and Spock does not glance up, listening as Kirk makes the rounds to the senior offices and finally himself. 

“Spock?” It’s soft and hesitant and Spock turns to answer it immediately, taking his place by his Captain’s side and looking out with him at the stars. “Where should we go?”

It’s an innocent question but feels to Spock as if it were laced with multiple, complex meanings. It is foolish to speculate on the future but Spock dreams for a moment. What will five years bring, what relationship might they have? 

In his standard gold, Kirk is the sun, golden and brilliant. He is the center of the Enterprise, of Spock’s narrowing cosmos. And Spock knows he will follow this man to the ends of the known universe and back. 

_Second star on the right,_ he thinks but does not say. 

“As a mission of this duration has never been attempted, I defer to your good judgment, Captain.” 

They will go where Kirk, and destiny, sees fit to take them. The small, private smile Kirk graces him with is more than enough for now, more than perfect and reassuring. 

In the shadow of death, there is also the promise of new beginnings, that smile says to Spock. 

He takes the seat as his station as Kirk takes the captain’s chair.

“Mr. Sulu, take us out.”

“Aye, Captain.”

The hum of the ship, their ship, under Spock’s hands reminds him of Kirk’s skin, alive and sure in that conference room. He turns to watch the Enterprise enter into warp, setting out among the stars to their new beginnings.


End file.
